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The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) Photos

Movie Info

Jacques Demy's 1964 masterpiece is a pop-art opera, or, to borrow the director's own description, a film in song. This simple romantic tragedy begins in 1957. Guy Foucher (Nino Castelnuovo), a 20-year-old French auto mechanic, has fallen in love with 17-year-old Geneviève Emery (a luminous Catherine Deneuve), an employee in her widowed mother's chic but financially embattled umbrella shop. On the evening before Guy is to leave for a two-year tour of combat in Algeria, he and Geneviève make love. She becomes pregnant and must choose between waiting for Guy's return or accepting an offer of marriage from a wealthy diamond merchant (Marc Michel, reprising his role from Demy's masterful debut, Lola). A completely sung movie, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is closest in form to a cinematic opera. Composer Michel Legrand composed the score, modeling it around the patterns of everyday conversation. Umbrellas was re-released in 1997.

Not only has he resurrected the quaint and artificial device of having the dialogue set to music and unrealistically sung, but he uses this operatic method to tell a story that is so banal... it wouldn't get beyond a reader in Hollywood.

The candy colored sets suggests the great Hollywood musicals: bright, clean, a utopian world, but with a distinctly French flavor. Instead of elaborate numbers we get intimate staging where every movement becomes like a dance...

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is inspired as much by René Clair's innovative French classic of 1930, Sous les toits de Paris, and the prewar Pagnol Marseilles trilogy (Marius/Fanny/César) as by Hollywood.

Audience Reviews for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg)

½

The editing is great and the art direction is gorgeous with its strong saturated colors, but for me this is an awfully frustrating film and the music very much like fingernails on a blackboard, absolutely insufferable as everything is sung through like a horrible arioso piece.

Carlos Magalhães

Super Reviewer

½

I've tried to watch this thing over and over again through the years, based on its reputation, but once they would start singing my attention would wander and I'd either fall asleep or leave it. My faux pas, baby, my big frickin' faux pas. Better than nearly 98% of musicals out there simply on theory alone, this very human arc of a love affair manages to comment as well on the art form of musicals, of romances, and even on tourism. And does it in another language. Truly a well deserved reputation on this one, try to get through it and NOT see yourself and all your previous romances, I dare you.

Kevin M. Williams

Super Reviewer

½

A full-on musical. Singing from start to finish, all 90 minutes. All scored, no talking, total commitment. The production design is also awesome enough to give Wes Anderson a hard-on.
How successful is it? Very. It's not without it's flaws, but it's very watchable.

Ken Stachnik

Super Reviewer

The colors, the picaresque locales, the entirely sung dialogue, and the angel that is Catherine Deneuve! "The Umbrellas of Cherbourgh" is 90 minutes of cinematic joy. Simple human melodrama made engaging, profound, and unforgettable in the hands of a master (Demy). If the ending doesn't make you weep then I guess you're just not human. A classic musical and easily one of the finest ever crafted.